For a growing number of public and private organizations, telemarketing is playing an increasingly vital role in specific functions and activities requiring direct communications with a caller/customer. These functions and activities include order entry, customer service, and reservations, to name a few. While call centers (also called telemarketing service centers) vary in the sophistication of their equipment, they are generally staffed by attendants who answer incoming calls and solicit from a caller information that may be needed to query a database for retrieval of other information, such as customers' account data, or product/service information that is of particular interest to that particular caller. In order to serve the maximum number of callers, every call center is designed to optimize call handling efficiency and attendant productivity. In furtherance of that goal, some prior art systems allow telephone attendants to service a greater number of callers by a) ascertaining a caller's basic request through the collection by a live attendant of initial information from the caller, and b) transferring the call to a voice response unit to address the specific request of the caller. Other systems reverse the answer and collection process by connecting the caller initially to a voice response unit which collects information that is ultimately used to route the call to the appropriate attendant. While these techniques increase attendants' productivity, systems implementing these techniques may be limited to business transactions that are rather simple and clearly defined. This deficiency is even more pronounced in other prior art systems that use fully automated, as opposed to semi-automated attendant systems. For moderately complex applications in which callers' requests vary significantly from one call to the next, semi-automated prior art systems may lead to disconnects, connection to the wrong attendant's pool, or a sequence of call transfers, that may be disconcerting to some callers.
Aiming to increase call handling efficiency and attendant productivity, other prior art systems take advantage of Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) incoming call identification capabilities to automate the caller's record retrieval process. More specifically, those systems allow a caller's record to be retrieved from a database using the caller's Automatic Number Identification (ANI) as a search key, thereby vitiating the need for a caller to provide verbal information to be used in the the database search operation. The retrieved caller's record is then displayed on the attendant's console as the call is received by the attendant's phone. However, when a call is originated from a telephone set which has a different number than the one stored in the database for a particular customer, the ANI-based automatic record retrieval feature afforded by those prior art systems is of limited help, even though a record may exist in the database for the caller. In addition, when the database has to retrieve product/service information, as opposed to a caller's record, the ANI-based automatic record retrieval feature is again of limited utility, because the database management system is unable to determine solely from the ANI, the particular product or service of interest to the caller.
A common device used in telemarketing centers to enhance attendants' productivity is an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) which allows a call center to cost-effectively handle a large number of calls by placing some of these calls in a holding queue when no attendants are available to handle them. Before a call is placed in a holding queue, a greeting message identifying the called party is ordinarily played by the ACD to the caller, indicating to him or her that the next available attendant will service the call. During the holding period, music or advertising messages may be played to the caller to entertain or inform the caller of sales promotions for particular products or services. Call queuing plays a very important role in call center operations. Its known advantages include a) increasing attendant's productivity by reducing idle time for attendants b) simultaneously handling a greater number of calls during a burst of calls, and c) encouraging callers to wait for an available attendant as opposed to requiring the caller to attempt another call to the call center in response to a busy tone condition. However, call queuing wastes the caller's time and may result in a) abandoned calls, b) potential loss of business, and c) poor customer satisfaction when the holding time is deemed excessive by a bored or an impatient caller. In addition, placing a call, such as an international toll-free call, in a holding queue for a significant period of time can increase the cost per transaction for each call. Furthermore, when the caller is finally connected to an available attendant, the latter has to solicit and collect from the caller information needed to complete a transaction and/or to retrieve the appropriate record to address the specific request of the caller. The time spent and effort exerted by the attendant for these activities could have been productively used by the same attendant for other functions, such as servicing another call.